In a 1916 reading by Kellas to TheRoyal Geographic Society and based on his observations of oxygen utilization on other Himalayan peaks, Kellas correctly predicted that, “near the top of Mount Everest…the rate of climbing might be less than 300 feet per hour.” Kellas’ larger 1920 manuscript, a masterpiece far ahead of its time, had a specific goal, “A Consideration of the Possibility of Ascending Mount Everest.”  It somehow lay dormant at the Alpine Club in London, given to them in 1920 but finally published in 2001 for the first time by John West in High Altitude Medicine & Biology. This larger Kellas work including a section on mountain lassitude.  Written in 1920, Kellas the expert did not specifically mention glacier lassitude because he died on the approach march of the 1921 First British Everest Reconnaissance Expedition weeks before they entered the Rongbuk area, and as we shall see, before George Mallory ever uttered the words.

The next two quotations are from Kellas’ section on physiological difficulties and mountain sickness.  Kellas appropriately discarded other theories such as ionizing, electrical, or even psychic origins. Instead, sounding much like John West’s future textbook of 2007, he emphasized that, “It is generally assumed that snow, especially melting snow under a hot sun, is far more likely to cause trouble than rock, and a ravine or gully with stagnant air is more likely to produce mountain sickness than an open ridge … it is far more likely that the climber is influenced by the intense reverberation of the sun’s rays from the snow.”  In his description of  ‘General malaise: lassitude’ there is an explanation that, “Mountain sickness varies within certain narrow areas….passes of about the same height in the same  region differ greatly as regards to mountain sickness….it has been generally assumed that one is more liable to be attacked when climbing in gullies and on snow, than on open ridges and rock.”  This sounds like glacier lassitude. Kellas and other writers that he referenced from as early as 1783 already knew of the problem. It just awaited the catchy name and this was certainly what George Mallory found out later, and verbalized, in 1921-1924. 

George Leigh-Mallory. It is ironic that on the First British Everest Expedition of 1921 medical observer Alexander Kellas died while mountaineer George Mallory described glacier lassitude, whereas on the Third British Everest Expedition of 1924 it was the other way around: the mountaineer George Mallory died while medical officer RWG Hingston officially reported glacier lassitude.

George Mallory, in his 1921 letters from Everest Base Camp complained that, “ I found it pretty hot on the glacier…I must confess to a degree of tiredness after the glacier work which I have never quite reached in the Alps.”

In  Bruce’s Everest Reconnaissance: the first expedition of 1921, Mallory’s section included the description of glacier and lassitude on the Main Rongbuk Glacier: “It was the glacier that had knocked me out, not the hard work alone but some malignant quality in the atmosphere, which I can neither describe nor explain; and in crossing a glacier during the day I always afterwards observed the same effect; I might feel as fit and fresh as I could wish on the moraine at the side but only once succeeded in crossing a glacier without feeling a despairing lassitude.”   Mallory repeats it in chapter 16 on weather and condition of snow, “More than once, though the sun was not shining, in crossing a glacier late in the day I was reduced from a state of alert activity to one of heavy lassitude.”   

In Mallory’s 1924 letters, published posthumously in Norton’s book on that fatal expedition, he depicted “the Trough” of the East Rongbuk Glacier like this, “Irvine suffered very much and I somewhat from the complaint known as glacier lassitude – a mysterious complaint, but I am pretty certain in his case that the sun and the dazzling light reflected from the new snow had something to do with the trouble.” (edit: emphasis added)

The use of “lassitude” involving explorers before 1921 such as Bruce, Conway, Longstaff, Morshead, Whymper, Wollaston, Workman, Younghusband and others revealed that the word was used in the traditional sense of fatigue in the mountains, but not the glacier-specific usage as in Mallory’s glacier lassitude.  Mallory’s use of   “known as” suggests he might not have been the first to say glacier lassitude in 1924, but he might have invented it earlier during that trip, or in 1921 on the Main Rongbuk Glacier, or in 1922 on the East Rongbuk Glacier. Many others seem to give credit to Mallory.

Norton , Odell, and Younghusband

Edward “Teddy” Norton, the leader after Bruce became ill,  reported in The Fight for Everest 1924,   that high on the East Rongbuk glacier at Camp III (21,300 feet) that, “Somervell – had more the matter with him than the early morning lassitude; he was in fact suffering rather severely from the sunstroke he had contracted in the windless glare of the “trough” the day before.”   Trough? The trough or medial moraine was part of the problem. The sun is strong there in the thin air and the location is closer to the equator than, for example, the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Looming tall seracs and other ice formations surrounded the team on all sides. Scientists refer to albedo - the extent to which something reflects light from the sun. Fresh deep snow over a featureless landscape may have an albedo as high as 90%. Glacial hard ice and/or an irregular surface may be less, however, the fact that the Trough climbers were surrounded on all sides suggests that they were thermally ambushed in a glacial slot canyon, thus experiencing not high-altitude lassitude alone, nor heat lassitude alone, but the two of them combined into the Himalayan Super Grand Total of Glacier Lassitude.

By the time of the Third British Everest Exploration, scientific understanding had improved.  Noel Odell, in his chapter on Geology and Glaciology in The Fight for Everest 1924, explained with scientific precision what happened on the East Rongbuk Glacier in 1924 and the previous expedition of 1922, and similarly on the Main Rongbuk Glacier 1921, “ In spite of the low mean annual temperature from which this region suffers, its situation in such low latitude (Everest is 28o N) causes it to experience the effects of a very hot sun [and] a striking example of the effects of a tropical sun is the way in which eastward and westward flowing glaciers frequently have their southern sides melted back into steep ice cliffs, a case in point being the tributary to the East Rongbuk at Camp II...this action is aided by reradiation of heat from rock-walls enclosing the glacier.” Odell continued with his description of the medial moraine, “The Trough – This interesting and possibly unique feature that provided a natural causeway for nearly 2 miles of the way up and down the East Rongbuk Glacier between Camps II and III, will ever be remembered as a fairy scene, of the greatest beauty and highest artistry… exhilarating in the extreme, except at the hot hours of the day in late May and June, when the close stagnant air within the depression of the Trough was apt to produce a certain lassitude and disregard for its remarkable beauty !”

So now we have these facts; we have arrived back to the three expeditions of the early 1920s, we have the glaciers, their location and description, the source of the heat, and the presence of mountaineers. In his 1926 trilogy about the three expeditions, The Epic of Mount Everest, the first Mount Everest Committee Chairman and Great Gamer Francis Younghusband  wrote that the “party felt a peculiar kind of lassitude which evaporated all the energy in them. It was what afterwards became known as “glacier lassitude,”” Note his choice of the word ‘afterwards.’

Richard William George Hingston served as the Medical Officer for the Third British Expedition to Everest, surprisingly reaching Camp IV (27,400 feet) and contributing to Norton’s book The Fight for Everest 1924. Identical paragraphs on glacier lassitude occur in that book and in Hingston’s “Physiological Difficulties in the Ascent of Mount Everest” appearing in The Geographical Journalin 192, copied here:

Glacier Lassitude – A distinct feature in the Mount Everest region is the very pronounced glacier lassitude which develops over tracts of ice. This was most marked on the Rongbuk Glacier, especially when passing through a trough in the ice at an altitude of about 20,000 feet. The trough was a remarkable feature, being girt on either side with walls of ice in many places hewn into fantastic pinnacles and ornamented with pyramidal spires. In this trough there was a peculiar sapping of energy, a weakness of the legs, and a disinclination to move. It was not a breathlessness due to exertion, but a loss of muscular power. There was a feeling of prostration. One seemed to drag oneself along, instead of going with the usual strength. A profuse sweating was not uncommon. It was something like the oppression experience when marching through a hot moist jungle in the rains. The lassitude appeared immediately after stepping on to the glacier; it was as quickly relieved on again reaching rock or moraine. It was most noticeable in the absence of wind and in the middle of the day when the sun was strong. It was absent late at evening and in the early morning, and was less marked on cloudy days.

The cause of this lassitude is easily explained. The conditions for its development are a sheet of ice, a hot sun and a still air. The sun melts the superficial layer of the ice. The lowest stratum of the atmosphere becomes saturated with moisture, but does not rise owing to its being chilled by contact with the ice. “Thus, when on the glacier, one is in a saturated atmosphere, and this, in conjunction with the high altitude, is sufficient to cause the unpleasant effects.” 

Hingstons’ first paragraph stands squarely on the shoulders of Longstaff, Kellas, Mallory, Norton, and Odell. The second paragraph, however, becomes problematic when he blames “saturated atmosphere.” A 1925 Lancet study discounted humidity as possibly contributing to glacier lassitude.   Leonard Hill and Argyll Campbell at the London National Institute of Medical Research discussed the physiological problems of the Everest expeditions and agreed that Hingston “clearly demonstrates that great lassitude was produced by overheating the body whilst at a high altitude.”  Hill and Campbell studied the effect of exercising while breathing air saturated with moisture and at low oxygen tension on six test subjects, simulating 20,000 feet in the laboratory. They concluded that while “Hingston refers to the air being saturated with moisture in the case of glacier lassitude… this factor is almost negligible,” and finally, “it may be concluded that “glacier lassitude” was due to the combined effects – of overheating of the body and of breathing oxygen at low tension.” The humidity theory died in the scientific literature, but the term glacier lassitude was to gain immortality in the mountaineering literature. 

Mountaineering Literature and Glacier Lassitude

Frank Smythe. The British mountaineer and prodigious romantic writer Frank Smythe wasted no time theatrically plugging the phrase into his literary hobby. He was a frequent embellisher, most famously known for his hallucinatory companion on Everest. In The Kanchenjunga Adventure and going badly on a glacier in 1930, he rightfully attributes the term glacier lassitude to the 1922 and 1924 Everest teams, “Members of the Everest expeditions remarked the same thing in the trough of the East Rongbuk Glacier.”

His artistic flare with glacier lassitude shows in three examples: from The Kanchenjunga Adventure in 1930, “The sun poured down upon us a fierce heat in which the snow became more abominable every hour [and]      once again we experienced the energy sapping effects of glacier lassitude ,”  from Kamet Conquered in 1932, “ Our bodies and minds became the unwilling slaves to that insidious drug, glacier lassitude [and] crossing the glacier…we felt like flies in the focus of a burning glass [for] the sun shone with relentless vigour upon our backs and our pace was funereal,” and from Camp Six on Everest 1937,  “On the snow-covered glacier there was such an airless blinding glare that our energy drained away like liquid through a funnel.”

Eric Shipton. In his 1955 condensation of multiple expeditions entitled Men Against Everest, famous British explorer Eric Shipton described the scene on the north side of Everest in 1921,  “As they climbed slowly up the glacier they were oppressed by a curious lassitude which robbed them of much of their strength. It was what has since become known as “glacier lassitude.””   Note his choice of the words ‘what has since become.’

Shipton delivered with hot penmanship his own vast experience in his later book Nanda Devi, “the blazing sun and the torrid glare from the snow produced a feeling of lassitude such as I have never experienced elsewhere except on enclosed glaciers at great altitudes.”  

Rum Doodle and more.  Matt Dickinson’s The Death Zone gives this credit, “ ‘Glacier lassitude’- the disease so brilliantly introduced to the world in the book, The Ascent of Rum Doodle,”  however, it was actually only exaggerated there.  Bowman’s Rum Doodle is a 1956 parody of a bumbling, thoroughly British Himalayan expedition, supposedly inspired by the 1934 & 1936 expeditions rendered more classically in Shipton’s Nanda Devi and/or HW Tilman’s The Ascent of Nanda Devi.At most, Rum Doodle gets credit for bringing many lassitudinal words to the armchair traveler. Bowman mentions London lassitude three times, heat lassitude once, valley lassitude once, plain lassitude once, sleeping bag lassitude once, altitude lassitude once, base camp lassitude once, and the vaunted glacier lassitude twice .

Summary

In conclusion, Longstaff, Kellas and others knew the symptoms of mountain lassitude, high-altitude lassitude, calm-air lassitude, and narrow-space lassitude, but never uttered the famous term “glacier lassitude.” Mallory first used the two words glacier and lassitude in the same sentence in 1921.  Mallory combined them into “glacier lassitude” in 1924 before he and Irvine disappeared on Everest.  Norton and Odell added their descriptions in 1924. Hingston authored his medical reports in 1924 and 1925.  Researchers Hill & Campbell clarified the phenomenon further in 1925. Younghusband, Smythe, Shipton, and others gave credit to the early pioneers, especially Mallory, and made it a literary tradition thereafter. There may be additional sources or private papers, especially prior to 1924, not included here. Other researchers are invited to assist in the analysis of the term glacier lassitude, and perhaps give credit to the words of George Mallory ‘because they are there.’

References

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